NEWLY RELEASED
INFORMATION REVEALS TOXIC LEAD AND ZINC CONTAMINATION AT RED DOG MINE’S PORT
SITE

AK Community Action
on Toxics

September 26, 2001

Anchorage, Alaska
– Today, Alaska Community Action on Toxics released newly discovered
information concerning high levels of lead and zinc
contamination at the Red Dog Mine port site. A monitoring program conducted at
the Red Dog mine’s port site in the mid-1990s found lead levels in soils as
high as 36,000 parts per million (“ppm”) and zinc levels as high as 180,000
ppm, far in excess of state cleanup standards of 1,000 ppm for lead and 8,100
ppm for zinc.Although the monitoring
program was conducted at the request of the Alaska
Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), this information was never
released to the public.

The port site
monitoring program was conducted by an environmental consulting company for Cominco Alaska, Inc., at the request of
the State of Alaska, Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority in
1990, 1991, 1992, 1995, and 1996.AIDEA,
which financed the construction of the port and 52-mile Red Dog Mine haul road,
leases the port site lands from the landowner, NANA Regional Corporation, and
Cominco is the operator.The port site
is an important subsistence food hunting and gathering area for Native
communities in the region.

“It’s
shocking that neither Cominco nor the state released this information to the
public as soon as it became available,” said Pamela K. Miller, Executive
Director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics, which obtained the reports
through a public records act request to AIDEA filed by the environmental law
firm Trustees for Alaska.“The
contaminant levels revealed in these reports are many times the regulatory standards,
raising enormous questions about the safety of the foods that have been
gathered at the port over the years and about the current health of the
environment,” said Miller.

Ingestion
of even small amounts of lead can cause serious health problems, especially for
children, and recent studies have shown that there is no safe level of exposure
to lead.

The
disclosure of the results of the AIDEA/Cominco reports follows on the heels of
a 2001 National Park Service study that was released
on June 20, 2001, showing elevated levels of
lead, zinc, and cadmium along the haul road that Cominco uses to transport ore
from the Red Dog Mine to the port site.

On
July 13, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Michele
Brown declined to issue an emergency order halting ore traffic on the haul road
until the cause of the contamination could be determined.On August 21, Governor Knowles also rejected
a request that he proclaim a disaster emergency.

The
Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation recently took vegetation samples
around the port site, but declined to take soil samples despite being asked to do so by ACAT and other groups.